Stratford
Monday morning
While recovering from my wound, my brothers, Jim and Dick, paid me a call.
They seemed quite uninclined to sit, skeptical of Ben, afraid of Pericles, contemptuous of the apartment with its manuscripts and shelves of books. Wearing their farm clothes, they smelled of dung, dirt, and rain-soaked cloth.
Jonson, wanting to be friendly, told how Pericles acted during the duel, winking at me, falsifying his ferocity. Brothers—were those men my brothers? Long ago, they had washed their hands of my life, Pilatewise. Mother praised them when I visited our home, ah me.
“I had heard that ya killed that-tar man, in yer duel,” said Dick, pawing his kneecaps.
Jonson clapped him on the shoulder.
“Wish him better luck next time,” he guffawed.
Jim and Dick had brown, flat faces, flattened by hunger, by defeat, lust, work, illness and sorrow. They had lost their children during the plague. Their teeth were blackened, or missing. Their clothes...what is a bundle of dirty clothes topped by a voice and a dead mind?